Note: This review contains spoilers.

In a story set six months before the events of Star Wars: Episode I: The Phantom Menace, Darth Maul's mission is to prevent Black Sun from interfering with the planned blockade and invasion of Naboo. To that end, he sets out to infiltrate the criminal organization, which turns out to be surprisingly easy....

Duursema's illustrations are again first rate, especially those of Maul himself. She produces another fine portrait of the Sith Apprentice on page 6, the highlight of the issue, but it's also emblematic of the problem with Darth Maul: the panel looks good, but it accomplishes little. It blows a whole page, and, in comics, where space is time, wastes the time spent on it, stopping the story dead.

One interesting detail is that all of the henchmen serving Darnada, the Black Sun Vigo Maul has targeted ( at least those with "speaking parts") are depicted with either scars above, or missing, their left eyes: Asa Naga, blue-skinned thug; Gargachykk, a grey, one-eyed Wookiee with three robust chin braids (no doubt due to the influence of Episode I's dramatic hairdos), and Sinya, Darnada's Twi-lek bodyguard. Is this some kind of badge, or merely . . . coincidence?

Drew Struzan's cover art again features the starry-eyed Maul, this time accompanied by the Infiltrator, which appears to be occulting a star, or star-like object, of approximately the same magnitude as that blazing out from Maul's left eye-socket (there's the left-eye motif again) on the first cover. For this cover, the star in Maul's eye is a much smaller, dimmer star: Is the dimming significant? Perhaps it's meant to be suggestive of Maul's effect on Black Sun? Whatever it means, it's a fine cover.

The Story:

What the first issue lacked was a story. Any improvement in that regard would have been welcome, and this installment does come closer to being a part of a story, however rudimentary. It begins with a bungled attempt to collect a gambling debt, punctuated by the appearance of Maul, saber lit. This in turn leads to an audience with Darnada, which gives Maul ample opportunity to carry out his sanguinary mission.

Narrative compression is nothing new in Star Wars -- remember Vader's lines from ANH: "This will be a day long remembered. It has seen the end of Kenobi. It will soon see the end of the Rebellion." [emphasis added] -- but the entirety of this issue's action seems confined to a few minutes of internal "story" time; as did the events of issue one -- they seem to rattle about within the borders of an untold story, so severely squeezed have they been.

In a series called Darth Maul, you'd expect to see a lot of Maul, and expect him to do more than light up and hack away. But the title character doesn't appear until page 6. And then we only see what we've seen before: Maul performing as a master of the Jedi Arts. We see nothing at all of how he managed his infiltration, nothing about any intrigue or machinations necessary to the mission. He does have a bit more dialog this time, 12 lines, tending to be short and monosyllabic, but memorable or illuminating they are not.

And before any of that, we first get to see the Fenoob incident, that bungled debt-collection referenced above. Asa Naga and Gargachykk, two of Darnada's underlings, attempt to apprehend Feen Fenoob, a Sullustan who owes the Vigo. Fenoob escapes, only to go to pieces, two of them, when he meets up with "...the wrong guy," as Naga puts it when he and his Wookiee companion find the Sullustan's remains.

If the book had started there, with the discovery of the bisected alien, it could have been a fine intro for Maul. But as it stands, the Fenoob incident overall diminishes the significance of Maul's prey. How important can a Vigo be, if his debt-collecting goons have personal access to him? There isn't even any indication that the sum owed by Fenoob was enough to make it of especial interest to the Vigo. (A random thought: Is it just a coincidence that the initials of Darth Maul's focus in this series are "B.S."?)

Which begs another question, Why was Maul sent to do this job in the first place? Was he the best candidate for it? Did it really call for the powers of a Sith Lord? Black Sun as depicted is not hard to infiltrate. Maul does so without obvious effort, rather too easily gains admittance to the presence of the Vigo in charge, and starts slashing away. If Sidious's plan is to distract Black Sun from the Trade Federation's blockade of Naboo by creating the appearance of a struggle among the Vigos through an assassination attempt, wouldn't another, less conspicuous minion be better suited to the task? At least another operative would have been able to avoid calling the kind of unwanted attention to himself, particularly from the Jedi, that a saber-swinging Dark Lord does.

And how much sense does it make to allow someone who has seen Maul, realizes he uses a Jedi weapon, even knows his name, to survive to tell the tale? Especially with Sith secrecy still Darth Sidious's policy? Yet that is what Maul does on Lord Sidious's orders (one assumes), allowing Asa Naga to live to spread the word after the nameless space station where the action takes place is destroyed.

A curious point about Naga. His all-consuming thought as he flees is, "The master. I have to tell the master..." Most likely, this means Prince Xizor, but is there perhaps more to Naga than meets the eye? Might this "master" be someone else ... someone interesting?

The Prospects:

Having executed one of Black Sun's nine Vigos, Darth Maul's martial arts skills seem to have taken him about as far as they can in the execution of his mission. This could be an encouraging sign, if it means in the next issue he must use other Sith skills to complete his assignment. It could as easily be a sign there will be less Maul, or more saber-swinging, in issue three. The price to find out has gone up four cents, but, for the diehards, this reviewer included, it's a price worth bearing.

(Dexter's passion for Star Wars, still undiminished nearly a quarter-century later, began in May 1977, when a late-night showing of A New Hope set his young imagination ablaze. An avid action figure collector, he has been known to lurk about local toy shops at ungodly hours, in hopes of beating the competition to the latest wave of Hasbro goodies. When not tracking down the latest resculpt of Darth Maul or Qui-Gon Jinn, he devotes his free time to pondering the most efficient use of his dwindling free storage space. His other passions include his library, and writing.)

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